National Endowment for the Humanities

National Endowment for the Humanities

Three Penn State Liberal Arts faculty members recently were awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships to continue their research projects. The National Endowment for the Humanities promotes excellence in humanities teaching and research, and supports new avenues of learning for the American public.

Gonzalo Rubio, associate professor of classics and ancient Mediterranean studies and history and religious studies at Penn State, has been awarded a 2012 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to conduct research about the earliest literary compositions in any Semitic language, a language family that includes Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic. The College of the Liberal Arts faculty member will pursue a detailed study, editions and translations of the earliest literary writings in Semitic languages, found on cuneiform clay tablets from Ancient Syria and Mesopotamia. The NEH Fellowship is widely recognized as one of the highest honors for scholars in the humanities.

The year 1900 symbolizes a key moment of transition, a time when the world was experiencing major social and political changes, significant developments in science, technology and medicine (automobile, airplane, telephone and the development of the rabies vaccine), population growth and the formation of nations, and the consolidation of capitalism and individualism. Penn State's Institute for the Arts and Humanities' second annual "Moments of Change" initiative will explore the turn of the 20th century and its lasting impact on global society and culture in a yearlong project with more than 40 events for scholars, artists, students and community members.

The University Libraries have been awarded a $393,650 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize historical Pennsylvania newspapers on microfilm, under the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). The two-year grant will cover the digitization of 100,000 pages of Pennsylvania newspapers published between 1880 and 1922, which will be entered into the Library of Congress's historical newspaper database, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.

While every era produces innovations and masterpieces, some periods of history are particularly marked by great cultural and artistic contributions, scientific breakthroughs, and political development.

These transformative periods are the inspiration for the Institute for Arts and Humanities "Moments of Change" initiative, a new annual series of symposia, performances, lectures and other events that will examine a specific groundbreaking historical time period during each academic year.

When Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring premiered in Paris in 1913, the audience reacted by cheering, jeering, and arguing with one another, causing such an uproar that they drowned out the orchestra. A Russian born composer who lived in France, Switzerland, and finally America, Stravinsky changed the ears of the world with his pounding, shifting rhythms and prominent dissonances often overlaid on Russian folk themes.

In West Africa, written history is something new. African history was written in European languages during the colonial era beginning in the late 1800s, and has been around in Arabic for centuries. But societies in the Sahel and Savanna regions of West Africa have long kept their own history, in their own languages, orally, in the form of epics.

Imagine relying on someone's memory to hold your people's history. In many parts of West Africa, this job is carried out by the griot.

"At a place called Lorca, in the eastern part [of Spain], runs a river called the Salty Brook. Be careful not to let it touch your lips or allow your horse to drink there, for this river is deadly," warns the 12th-century author of The Pilgrimís Guide to Santiago de Compostela. "On its bank, while we were going to Santiago, we met two men of Navarre sitting sharpening their knives; they are in the habit of skinning the mounts of pilgrims who drink that water and die. When questioned by us, these liars said that it was safe to drink.

Braveheart was a good film," Gerard J. Brault graciously admits, but not an especially accurate one. "The Scottish noblemen don't seem to have any coats of arms in the movie," he notes with disappointment. "And we know, at that time"—the turn of the 14th century—"that some of them did."

In 1327 in the north English town of Castleford, an aged knight, long retired to the cloister, put down his pen. He had just finished the final rhymed couplets of a 39,437-line chronicle of the history of Britain, from its founding by the Syrian princess Albina and her 32 shipwrecked sisters, to the imprisoning of the current English king, Edward II, in a castel,